One of the time-honored delights of New York is the so-called street food offered by all manner of vendors. Tourists welcome the novelty of these rolling mini-kitchens on so many corners, and often go back to Peoria or Dubuque talking about the crusty hot pretzel or Hebrew National hot dog or roasted nuts they bought and consumed on the street. What many visitors don’t realize is how much everyday New Yorkers depend on street vendors near their homes or offices.

Sometimes it’s worth a subway trip — even to the outer boroughs — to try a local food cart that offers a menu far beyond the routine fare in touristy areas of Manhattan. In the Bronx, for example, Fauzia Abdur-Rahman’s regulars know the only guarantee is that there won’t be hot dogs or pretzels. Of the 10 or so items on her menu every day, she promises to include rice, some sort of chicken dish and at least one vegetarian option.

Everything else is up in the air.

“Today I have a spicy stewed chicken,” said Abdur-Rahman recently. “I just bought a case of mushrooms, so tomorrow I might make stew with that.”

“I live in Manhattan, and her vegetarian food is some of the best I’ve ever had, anywhere,” said Diane Donato, a high school teacher who frequents the cart. “She has a very fine hand with spicing and flavoring.”

Although she typically only serves lunch, Abdur-Rahman arrives at her corner every morning around 8:45 a.m to begin cooking. A basic outline of the day’s menu is planned the night before, based on whatever ingredients the 51-year-old mother of three has available.

All but two dishes are made from scratch in the next two and a half hours or so; Abdur-Rahman serves cake from Lloyd’s Carrot Cake, a North Bronx institution, and every once in a while, she makes Jamaica’s national dish, ackee and saltfish, using canned ackee — the national fruit of Jamaica.

Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Abdur-Rahman first came to New York City 34 years ago. In the nearly two decades before getting her street vendor’s license, Abdur-Rahman worked for myriad employers — her jobs ranged from grocery store cashier to secretarial positions — but said her family ultimately convinced her to take the risk of entrepreneurship.
“One day my grandmother just pretty much told her that, you know, ‘this is pretty much the only way that you can do what you want to do,’” said Ibrahim, Abdur-Rahman’s 25-year-old son.

Abdur-Rahman’s unique cooking style developed through on-the-job experimentation, and a blending of the divergent culinary interests of her mother and sister.

“When I was younger, my mom was not that good of a cook,” Ibrahim said. “My grandmother had taught her to make some Jamaican foods, like codfish cakes, and we sold them at fairs for extra money.”

As Abdur-Rahman mastered her mother’s Jamaican classics, she and her sister, Gay-Marcin Smith, began experimenting with diverse tastes. Smith recalls learning about the ethnic foods while attending weekly potluck dinners with her college’s multi-cultural club.

“Every Friday night you’d have an abundance of food from Ghana, Morocco and all over,” said Smith. “I started sharing with (Abdur-Rahman) the types of things I learned… but you can’t just throw it all together, you have to really understand different seasonings.”

Soon Abdur-Rahman assimilated her favorite flavors from New York.

“New York is such a melting pot and people are very open to different flavors and tastes, said Abdur-Rahman. “You’ll find, you know, somebody from Ireland, and they want jerk chicken!”

“I play with different flavors and tastes,” said Abdur-Rahman. “You would never go to a Jamaican restaurant and get butternut squash, or green beans and corn. But as long as the flavors are balanced, it’s good.

Abdur-Rahman gives credit to the city’s heterogeneous culinary landscape, with contributing to the success of her food.

“I love Indian food, the flavors and the spices, so I incorporate that. And I love Iranian food; you know, I love how they use lemon. So I incorporate a little of that, too.”

By 11 a.m., Abdur-Rahman is usually finished preparing her food, but people often start checking to see if she’s ready well before.  While the menu varies from day to day, customers say the quality is reliable.

Bronx prosecutor Jamie Moran regularly makes time for Heavenly Delights’ long lines. “Even though it takes a long time, everybody stands here and waits. Even if it’s cold,” said Moran.

At the height of the midday rush, as many as a dozen people at a time wait in front of Heavenly Delights – a trend that local competitors have noticed

“There’s a new place in the mall selling fried fish and they have a guy who hangs around,” Abdur-Rahman said. “Then there’s another Jamaican restaurant, and his guy sometimes actually comes on my line to hand out his stuff.”

Managers at both restaurants, Shrimp Box and Sa Lena West Indian Restaurant, confirmed that they hand out flyers nearby.

As he left the Bronx County courthouse recently, Michael Thomas, a sales trainer for Research in Motion, said he was drawn to Heavenly Delights by scents that reminded him of his own Jamaican heritage.

“Originally, I was just looking for coffee, but then obviously I smelled the spices and the food,” said Thomas. “Those are the things. It’s the smell that tantalizes you. That’s what draws you.”

Sometimes, the bus will lurch forward as you make your well practiced bargaining pitch. You find yourself scrambling to reach your prize– goat meat on a stick, golden and dripping with grease, throwing coins down to your seller’s hands, while your neighbor pulls a loud, distressed chicken through the window.  It’s awkward, but the bounty is worth it.  Even as I write on my laptop in New York, thousands of miles away, I still feel hungry thinking about it.  Goat meat is fairly easy to get in my Queens neighborhood, but it just doesn’t taste like it did on a bumpy, late-night bus ride along a dirt highway in East Africa.

It was not a likely place for a girl from Long Island to be going, that’s for sure.  Most of my classmates from high school were probably speeding along the Long Island Expressway, or going out to Jones Beach.  But I was making my way to northern Uganda.  I had visited the country several times over the past year and a half, and had been working as a journalist for a daily newspaper in the capital, Kampala.  But I had never spent more than a couple of days in the north.  When you live in Uganda, the north feels like a different country—as if you might need a visa stamp to drive the five or six hours from Kampala to Lira or Gulu, the major Northern towns.  The rest of Uganda is generally perceived internationally as stable, democratic, a loyal friend of the U.S.  The north is a historical and present-day landmine, where more than a million people have been displaced by two decades of civil war.  Even though there is a ceasefire now, and a peace treaty is being negotiated, the region is devoid of almost any effective government, cut off from many services.  Among all its other crises is a world-class killer: northern Uganda is the deadliest malaria zone in the world.

I had been assigned to go to Lira and interview children who had been traumatized by the recent war.  The war in northern Uganda was different than most conflicts, because it relied heavily on child soldiers.  Almost ninety percent of the soldiers in the rebel army were children abducted from Ugandan families, forced to fight against their communities and the Ugandan government.  The use of child soldiers made fighting against the rebel group, called the Lord’s Resistance Army, difficult—any battle against the LRA was often considered a massacre, since most of the casualties were children who didn’t want to be there in the first place.

Although there was a ceasefire now in Uganda, many of the children had not been freed yet, and those who had came home to communities that had been attacked by the very army they had been forced to join.  Boys and girls were both captured by the LRA, and the girls, despite their young age, were often forced to serve as ‘wives’ of the LRA commanders, basically sex slaves.  Many became what are called ‘child mothers’ in Uganda, or young girls who became pregnant by rape when they had barely reached puberty.  The child mothers were still forced to fight against the Ugandan government, and they carried the babies on their small bodies from battle site to battle site.  When the government was really cracking down on the LRA, the rebel army forced them to flee to the Sudan, where the Sudanese government, angry with Uganda for supporting Sudanese rebels, gave them a base from which to launch attacks against Uganda.

Many international journalists have gone to Lira or Gulu to interview and catch glimpses of the child soldiers.  Those who have escaped present compelling stories- their reunions with communities they thought would reject them, child mothers escaping on foot for hundreds of miles to reach home, and complex, difficult ways of learning to forgive those who had abducted them.  But New Vision, a national daily paper, gave me a unique story assignment—I would interview both child soldiers and children not captured but affected by the war, and tell their stories through the newspaper’s pullout on children so other Ugandan kids could get a glimpse into their lives.

I was eager to tell the silent stories of war-affected children, who might not have been abducted but lived one evening at a time, not sure if they would survive another year without being abducted, or their family’s fields or store looted by rebels.  Although many journalists wrote about child soldiers, no one really wrote about the kids who weren’t abducted, but were afraid.  Those children had to cope with the fact that the rebels looked just like them: small, afraid, living evening by evening.

I didn’t know what to expect.  I had been to northern Uganda so briefly before, and if I hadn’t known the history of the region, it would have looked like any other part of the country.  Cassava, coffee, and peanut farms, farmers living in huts made of mud and wattle.   Kids who waved excitedly when they saw you.  One-story homes and the smell of charcoal from cooking stoves.  This time would be similar, since I was still just going for two nights.  But this time, I planned to immerse myself in the place where I would be going: Lira, a devastated farming town trying to rebuild after decades of terror and violence.

I was nervous going on the bus ride, unsure how the interviews would go.  What if I couldn’t find any child soldiers, or children who had been impacted by the war, who wanted to talk? What if I re-opened memories that were better left unsealed? After all, many of the kids, as well as the adults, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Of course, there were other worries, too.  The one that felt the most intimate had to do with the slight itching on my left leg.  I feared the anopheles mosquito, which spread malaria.  Rumor had it that it hit foreigners twice as hard as Ugandans, since we lacked centuries of immunity built through our family blood lines.  Even with some immune resistance, malaria is the number one threat Ugandans face when it comes to their safety- not rebel armies, or HIV.

Malaria is the top killer of Ugandan children, and a major killer of refugees from other countries, as well as internally displaced people.  If you walk into a major hospital in Uganda, twenty percent of their admissions are malaria-related.  Every year, between 70,000 and 110,000 Ugandan children die from malaria, according to the health ministry—or between 190 and 300 deaths a day on average.

Unfortunately, I knew this intimately.  About two weeks before I left the United States to work in Uganda as a reporter, I called my boyfriend, who lives in Kampala, and he told me that his six-year-old stepsister had died from the disease.  When I called his mother later that day, she told me that his sister developed a rare form of the disease called cerebral malaria, which can kill almost instantly.  The malaria went straight to her brain, and she died shortly after.  That type of malaria was rare, but not rare enough for most Ugandan families.  Cerebral malaria is the number one cause of malaria deaths, and is any Ugandan mother’s worst nightmare.

In Kampala, where I had been working, the malaria rates were significant, but not as high as they were in northern Uganda.  Many of the districts within northern Uganda are part of significant water basins, which attract mosquitoes in drove, and the whole region lacks basic health infrastructure.  In one district in northern Uganda, called Apac, residents suffer a breathtaking 1,568 bites from malaria-infected mosquitoes a year.

As an ivory-skinned, wimpy American with virtually no immunity to the disease, I often felt like a beacon in Uganda, calling all mosquitoes to deposit their deadly parasites into my bloodstream.  I had been wimpier than my American colleagues when I studied abroad in Uganda the first time around, picking up as many as twenty mosquitoes bites when we went hiking.  That time, I took medicine daily to prevent malaria.  The other college students would get one bite here, one bite there.  We would walk through eerily beautiful forest landscapes, and while other students would take pictures of waterfalls on their digital cameras, I would be scratching my legs.  Even as I write this, I still have faint scars on my legs from mosquito bites I really shouldn’t have been scratching.

While I was attracting mosquitoes working and studying in Uganda, many of the Ugandans around me were less worried about the disease than about the latest campaign against malaria – a national program to wipe out the mosquitoes by spraying the indoor walls of people’s homes with a pesticide, DDT, which was banned in the United States. Which was a greater danger, many of my friends wanted to know, the disease or the possibly carcinogenic cure?

I would put my fears aside, play the situation by ear, and call my editor if I encountered problems.  The newspaper had been surprised that I even wanted to go.  Wouldn’t it be better to stay in Kampala, where things were safe? But I wanted to cross the boundary between what felt like two countries, and see what Uganda was like when you crossed that invisible line between north and south. It’s why I hopped on the bus from Kampala to Lira.  Now, who knew what good stories were waiting for me?

****

On my way north, I had sat next to a young man who was unusually quiet, almost New York City subway-passenger quiet.  He looked about seventeen or eighteen, and who knows, maybe he was actually a New Yorker, because he didn’t greet me or glance my way, even though we were crammed into two seats by the window. He was a skinny guy, but he seemed to need two seats, because with each turn, he would slam his body weight against mine. He kept quietly shoving me against the bus wall, until I gave up half of my seat and he stretched over one and a half. Definitely, I thought, a secret New Yorker. I could easily picture his slender frame, jeans and cotton t-shirt on a subway in Manhattan, perhaps the 2 train.

I declared defeat, silently of course, and looked out the window, watching the sun set into Uganda’s dark green hills in the distance. Our bus left Kampala around four p.m., and around six, the sun went down peacefully over the endless acres of farms and hills, and I wondered how the bus driver could see the dusty road without street lights. Some questions, of course, are better left unanswered.

I was going to see my friend Zack, whose work in northern Uganda had given me a news peg to get a reporting assignment upcountry. Zack was an unusual guy. He had graduated from a private high school in Los Angeles, a school that the Olsen Twins had gone to, and then headed off to college in Colorado, where he developed an interest in Africa through some classes he took.

Most people would stop there, but Zack boarded a plan to Ghana and then Uganda, feeling as comfortable in places like Lira as he would at an upscale neighborhood in L.A. The year before, we had attended the same study-abroad program in Uganda, and during our visit to rural eastern Uganda, Zack had built a mud-wattle cottage by himself, slaughtered chickens, talked about politics, and had drunk from a grainy, communal alcohol pot with about twenty men, each with their own straw. The boy was far from L.A., and he didn’t want to go back. The next summer, after a year of fundraising using his family’s connections, he raised about $30,000 and decided to hold a three-day conference for former child soldiers in Lira.

By the time the conference was held, I’d be on a plane back home, but I wanted to see how his preparations were going.  I thought the work he was doing was both important and gutsy.  The twenty years of civil war killed between ten and twenty thousand people, and also displaced hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers. They were tired of being attacked and abused by the government and rebel forces, each of which accused the farmers of collaborating with the other side.  For Zack to pick up his bags in L.A. and move to Northern Uganda, I thought, was pretty shocking.

Both of us had entered Uganda at a time when the government was stirring up more resentment when it started spraying inside people’s homes with DDT, a program supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Health Organization. Environmental groups and organic farming organizations had sued the Ugandan government, and a court injunction had temporarily stopped the spraying, but the region, as well as the country, was locked into a fierce debate over whether it was safe to spray the pesticide, even in small doses. Some Ugandans, paranoid after decades of living under dictatorships, thought the government might be attempting to wipe out the ethnic groups of northern Uganda through the allegedly carcinogenic chemical. Others wondered why the United States would fund the spraying of DDT after the chemical had been banned in America in the 1970s.

Dichloro-diphenyl-trhichloroethane, or DDT, remains one of the most controversial chemicals in existence. The synthetic pesticide became popular during the second half of World War Two, used to fight malaria and typhus, and caught on during peacetime as an agricultural insecticide. DDT wasn’t always a dirty name; in fact, a chemist from Switzerland won the Nobel Prize for his work in using DDT as an insecticide.

Othmar Zeidler, a German-Austrian chemistry student at a university in France, first created DDT from a mixture of alcohol, chlorine, and sulfuric acid. However, Zeidler didn’t realize the potential that the compound had as an insecticide, and DDT was largely unused until a Swiss chemist created the same compound on his own when trying to create a pesticide. The chemist, Paul Müller, found the chemical to be effective in killing house flies during the first chemical trial, and DDT products were soon developed to target mosquitoes, lice, and some other pests.

In the 1940s, DDT was celebrated internationally as the super chemical that would wipe out everything from malaria to bedbugs, cockroaches, and the common household fly. It was also believed that DDT would protect the world’s crops from debilitating insects.

After World War II, the U.S. government used DDT to control pests on crops and forestlands, and people used the chemical in their own homes and gardens. In 1955, after Europe and the United States used the pesticide to eliminate malaria from their own countries, the World Health Organization started a program to eradicate the disease worldwide, relying mostly on DDT. The WHO eliminated malaria in Taiwan, most of the Caribbean, northern Africa, and much of the South Pacific. It also had some significant successes in reducing malaria mortality in Sri Lanka and India. WHO did not really attempt to wipe out malaria from sub-Saharan Africa, however, stating that the lack of public health infrastructure on the continent was too limited, and the life cycle of mosquitoes too long, to make DDT effective.

Eventually, the United States came to have second thoughts about DDT. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book that launched the modern-day environmental movement by triggering public interest in pesticides and pollution. Carson said she did not advocate banning the use of pesticides domestically, just using them in a well-managed way. Her book generated a public uproar, however, and DDT was banned in the United States in 1972.

Many other countries also decided to ban DDT, sometimes with critical health consequences. Zanzibar, an island that is part of Tanzania, had used DDT to bring rates of malaria drastically down to 5 percent, but after its ban, the malaria rate in Tanzania rose, until between 50 and 60 percent of the population suffered from malaria for at least a year.
When I first started traveling to Uganda in 2007, the government hadn’t started spraying inside of people’s home yet, but newspaper editorial pages and radio talk shows were debating the proposal.

Malaria was constantly on my mind, and my parents were even more worried about my decision to visit a malaria zone. After all, the disease hits hardest those – like me – who have not developed a resistance to it.

I already had habits that drove my parents crazy. I rode the subway late at night, I forgot to carry cash on me, I would always lose my keys and wallet.  How could I be trusted to take precautions against malaria? My father became addicted to Google, and he read about the ins and outs of the disease, the proper prophylactic treatment (the nasty drugs that make you sick from the side effects, but keep you disease-free) and the mosquito nets.

During that first trip to Uganda during a college study abroad program, I took an expensive little drug called Malarone, which cost $6 a day to keep me malaria-free.  The drug gave me weird, eerie dreams, but those were nothing compared to the dreams that my colleagues on Larium, a much more toxic drug, were having.  For Americans interested in traveling to major malaria zones, Larium can be tempting.  It is much cheaper than other malaria drugs, and doesn’t need to be taken every day.  One dose of Larium every 7 days is all you need.  But the side effects are notorious: visual disturbances, vivid dreams, and anxiety attacks.  In the long-term, Larium can damage both your liver and your eyes.

Although I stuck with the Malarone when I was in Uganda the first time, when I came back to work for a daily paper, I knew there was no way I was taking any anti-malaria drug.  If I got malaria, I decided, I would go to a clinic, take a couple of shots, swallow some tablets, and take a day off from work.  This is more than what most Ugandans would be able to do if they came down with a malaria spell, and I figured I would be okay.  However, as I sat on that bus to northern Uganda, I knew that the region had the worst malaria rates in the world, and that the mosquitoes would be more intense.  The one good thing was that I was traveling during the dry season. If it had been the rainy season, the road could have been washed away, and thirty to forty bites could have been easily waiting for me.

As I sat on the bus, watching the sun set over Uganda’s dark green hills, I thought about my first week in Uganda, and my first night with my homestay family.  Living them had changed my attitudes towards malaria, how it could be viewed almost in the way colds and flus were seen in the U.S.  Even if the disease was a deadly killer.  During that first night, I was navigating both the time change, anti-malaria drugs and cultural shock.  I was a twenty-one-year-old New Yorker, a coffee-drinking, 1-train hating, fast-talking, skittish female. I was in a Kampala suburb called Kanyanya, a semi-rural town that juxtaposed cell phones, American hip-hop fashion, and bootlegged Indian movies with roosters, cows, and red-brown dirt roads that turned into tiny, messy rivers during the rainy season. My home-stay family had volunteered to adopt me for three months and teach me how to survive, to bargain, to speak in conversational Luganda, and to learn the polite decorum of the society.

My Ugandan family was initially skeptical. I had been told to dress up for my first meeting with them, and when they saw my business attire and huge suitcases, I later learned, they predicted I would head back to the United States in less than a week. They were, of course, wrong. As I was trying to absorb my introduction to Uganda, learning new words and seeing new things, my Ugandan family became more relaxed – and my American family more nervous. At night in Uganda, I would collapse as soon as my mosquito net was tucked into my mattress. At night back in the States, my parents lay sleepless.

I was living in a typical home of a middle-class Ugandan family. The unpainted walls were covered with colorful newspaper pages. The furniture was simple. I slept in a guest room with two beds. Bright light emanated from an energy-saving light bulb dangling from the ceiling. There were two trunks filled with school papers and saved writings on one side of the room, and I had stacked my own green suitcase on top of the trunk. The family I had temporarily joined offered me four coat hangers, which I had to use as efficiently as possible.

I could dimly hear the sound of the TV coming from the room of my home-stay mother, Justine, an accountant working in Kampala’s city center. She still volunteers to host American students when they attend a grassroots development studies program at Makerere University. The houses in Kanyanya are built close together, and I could hear the sounds of conversation in Luganda coming from the neighbors’ houses nearby. I could also faintly hear the sound of the woman sleeping in the bed next to mine.

In Ugandan families, it is bad luck to sleep alone. Many Ugandans grow up with six to ten or even twelve brothers and sisters, and rarely spend time alone. Some feel anxious at the thought of being by themselves, and if guests visit, it is considered rude to give them a room for themselves. After all, wouldn’t your guest be lonely? The cultural differences made me smile; as an only child of divorced parents, I was used to my own company. On my first night with them, my family had the mother’s niece come and sleep in the bed next to mine, so I could have a roommate who also was my agemate.

The next night, I shared the room with the family’s oldest daughter, a ten-year-old girl named Jaliah. Both Jaliah and the niece were experts at using mosquito nets. They knew how to tuck their nets in, or re-hang them from the ceiling if the net slipped from its hook. Like most Ugandans, they had had malaria countless times; the symptoms usually begin within four weeks of infection, when the sufferer develops high fevers, shaking chills, muscle aches, and tiredness. The nets offered some protection from the potentially life-threatening mosquitoes, and saved the family’s pocketbook from a treatment that would take any money they had planned on using for groceries or transport that week.

Once, I made the mistake of putting down my mosquito net when there were already two mosquitoes circulating around my bed, and I trapped them both inside my net. I had been exhausted, and fell asleep almost before my head touched my pillow. I awoke two hours later, covered with swollen bites, and attempted to chase the mosquitoes away from my bed, lifting up the net. The family’s electricity had gone out, so I swatted my hands aimlessly in the dark.

That first night in Uganda, my mouth was dry. I didn’t like the taste of the family’s drinking water. They collected rainwater in a large, rusty, blue-red bucket that came up to my waist. They then boiled the rainwater on a charcoal stove in the kitchen, the room next to the guest room. There was a vague scent of charcoal in the guest room. I reminded myself to buy some bottled water the next day.

The blanket was wool – hot and itchy. The net kept me sweating, trapping hot air over my bed. I kicked off the blanket and slept under only the sheet. I had to go to the bathroom, but I was scared of using the latrine, where there was no light and just a small hole that went down 20 feet into the ground. It was very dark. What if I dropped something by accident, and it rolled into the hole? Where, exactly, did I put my flashlight? The last time I had tried to use the latrine in the dark, earlier in the evening, I had missed the hole and peed on my feet. Plus, going to the latrine at night meant I might get bitten by more mosquitoes. I was learning quickly: during my time in Africa, the threat of malaria would accompany me everywhere.

In Uganda, poverty and malaria are inextricably linked. Many poor, tropical countries suffer immensely from malaria. Poverty both causes and is caused by malaria. Poor countries are less able to devote precious public resources to the disease, and spending money on disease treatment can wipe out a family’s savings, or put it into debt. In one year, a poor family in Uganda can spend as much as 25% of its income on malaria treatment. The rainy season in Uganda, a critical time for agriculture, often causes higher rates of malaria, and farmers lose time they might spend working recovering from the disease.

Malaria also causes absenteeism from school, since children suffer six cases of malaria a year on average in Uganda, and affects school performance when children make it to the classroom. For pregnant women, malaria becomes an even more serious disease. The health ministry estimates that malaria causes 60% of miscarriages that Ugandan women experience, and the disease frequently causes low weights in newborns, as well as stillbirths.

Malaria is spread by anopheles mosquitoes, but the root of infection are the malarial parasites that feast on their victims’ red blood cells. When a mosquito bites an infected person, it consumes a blood meal full of malarial parasites. It will take a week for the mosquito, now infected, to be able to transmit the disease to another human being. If the mosquito lives another week, it becomes capable of transmitting malaria to everyone it bites.

Let’s say it bites my Ugandan home-stay sister Jaliah, when she gets up in the middle of the night. She lifts up her mosquito net, picks up the kerosene lantern next to her bed and goes to use the latrine. As she walks to use the toilet, a mosquito could bite her. If the mosquito carried the malarial parasites, they would be passed through the mosquito saliva into her body. About ten days later, Jaliah could wake up with a high fever, terrible chills, and nausea. If she was already malnourished or suffering from HIV, the disease could be lethal, particularly if her family could not raise the money in time for her to get treatment.

The best solution, of course, would be to remove the mosquitoes from Jaliah’s path.  In 1998, the World Health Organization, many African governments, and charities launched a campaign called “Roll Back Malaria,” which planned to halve the number of malaria deaths worldwide by 2010, through a combination of mosquito bed nets, insecticides, and medicine for patients when they did fall sick.  However, in 2007, a million people died of malaria, and 500 million people were infected with the disease.

Five years into the program, malaria deaths were actually increasing worldwide, though countries like Rwanda and Eritrea had made significant strides in fighting the disease.   Roll Back Malaria struggled with four major leadership changes in five years. Also, it was difficult to find a baseline measuring how many malaria deaths occurred each year. A misestimate in 1998 could make it appear that malaria was on the rise, when actually doctors, scientists, and public health advocates were simply recording deaths more accurately.

Another critical problem with Roll Back Malaria was that donors gave tangible commodities, such as bed nets or medicines, when many countries lacked the public health systems to effectively deliver either.  During British colonialism, the Ugandan colony had invested in the health infrastructure of the central Buganda kingdom for decades, but had neglected many other regions of the country, such as northern Uganda.  The Buganda kingdom was considered pivotal to the success of British colonialism in East Africa, and its people had more access to education and civil service jobs.  On the other hand, northern Ugandans were restricted to only joining the military or working in agriculture.

The neglect in infrastructure, resulting in everything from lack of jobs to poor education and health facilities, caused people to migrate to Kampala, where the poor built huge slums in swampy, low-level parts of the city. This rush to Kampala, particularly during the war in northern Uganda, overwhelmed the public health systems that had been relatively strong.

In April 2008, the Ugandan government began a new strategy. Coordinating with and using the funds of the World Health Organization (WHO) and USAID, it began spraying DDT in Oyam and Apac districts, two districts in the north. Once again, all did not go smoothly. Three weeks after the spraying began, the government began to squabble with exporters of organic products in Uganda, which sell organic crops to Europe and the United States. A group of organic companies filed a lawsuit against the government, arguing that Uganda had violated the WHO guidelines for indoor residual spraying, doing the spraying in a way that could contaminate the Ugandan food chain.

Although the European Union had said it would continue to accept Ugandan exports as long as the standards of WHO were met, organic companies were afraid that they would lose their market, worth about $500 million a year, if traces of DDT were found. Even British American Tobacco joined the group, stressing a potential health risk if traces of DDT were found in its tobacco products.

On May 30th, the Ugandan High Court called for a temporary halt to the use of DDT in the districts that had been scheduled for spraying, even though the WHO and Ugandan Health Ministry reported significant drops in both malaria cases and deaths in the communities they sprayed.

The Ministry of Health has been trying to have the DDT ban overturned, but faces strong opposition, particularly from Ken Lukyamuzi, a popular environmental and political figure in Uganda. The DDT spraying has been halted. More expensive, but less effective insecticides are being used for indoor spraying.  USAID continued to support the spraying, stating that DDT had now been endorsed by the World Health Organization as an important tool in the fight against malaria.

My journey to northern Lira took me into the center of this bitter debate.  And when the bus pulled into Lira, I didn’t know what to expect.  It was almost midnight, and there were almost no streetlights in the town.  All I could think about was the recent war, and how it had affected Lira.  I remembered a BBC article I had read about a massacre in Lira in 2004, when the rebels attacked a refugee camp outside the town, and the government fought back.  The civilians were the ones who suffered, with 200 people dying in the crossfire.  Many people died in their grass, homes at the camp when rebels lit the makeshift structures on fire.  The name of the camp was Barlonyo, and it had suffered the most devastating attack in northern Uganda in ten years.  Now, the war was over, but I wondered how much the memory of the attack on Barlonyo lingered.  It had only been four years ago.

As I checked into a hotel after leaving the bus, I couldn’t help but realize how far I was from the refugee camps where the displaced Northerners lived.  Not in terms of physical distance, but in the emotional distance between the hotels that had started to spring up in the wake of the ceasefire as people began to travel again, and the million people who would never go on vacation, or even just return to the simple homes they left.  The hotel was called the White House Hotel.  Though it would have been a modest motel in the United States, it felt like a small castle within the small, farming town.

I entered the small room I had booked for two nights, and was relieved to see that it had a mosquito net already hanging from the ceiling. I thought of the time I went to a shopping mall in Kampala, and saw a worker who had been mopping a floor drop her mop and collapse against the wall.  Sweat dripped down her forehead, and she held her hand to her forehead limply.  When I asked her if she was okay, she told me she had malaria, and indicated that she had a terrible headache.  And I knew it hit foreigners much worse than Ugandan.  Just thinking about the disease made me shudder.

I thought about this as I turned on the shower handle, and watched steam come from the water.  Forget malaria, I thought, I have hot water! I had been living in an apartment in Kampala for several months with only cold water, which had had a tragic effect on my hygiene.  I had started to bathe every other day, and my showers lasted about thirty seconds.  Sometimes, I would heat water in a small percolator I bought at Uganda’s version of Wal-Mart, fill a bucket, and take a hot shower that way.  But this, an overhead shower? All thoughts of malaria were gone, and I was overjoyed.  I stood under the hot water for over thirty minutes, feeling the tension of the bus ride eased from my body.

When I got out of the shower after flooding the bathroom, I hung my mosquito net over the bed, climbed underneath, and reviewed my questions for the next day.  I had general questions about Lira that I could ask anyone I talked to, whether they were a farmer or shopkeeper, and questions that were specific to children who had been kidnapped and forced to serve in the LRA.  But soon, I closed my eyes and fell asleep instantly.  Outside of my mosquito net, there was a faint buzz, but whether it was part of a dream or the Lira experience, I wasn’t sure.

The next morning, I joined a mixed group of middle-class Ugandans and expatriate American charity workers for a breakfast of white toast, passion fruit juice, and scrambled eggs.  “Where is the coffee?” I asked the kitchen staff, trying not to sound too anxious.  I was a terrible coffee addict.

“Over there,” a cook said, and she pointed to a small container of Nescafe instant coffee.  I pounced on it, dumped a huge spoonful into the boiling water they had given me to make tea, and asked for some milk.  Most Ugandans drank their coffee black, with about four to five spoonfuls of sugar, so the staff was a bit puzzled.

“Do you want a glass of milk?” they asked.  I gave up and drank the coffee black, which gave me a little bit of a stomachache, but I felt relaxed and happy to finally be out of Kampala.  I loved the capital, but sometimes you needed a break from the pollution, crowdedness, and traffic jams.  In Kampala, when I would sneeze, I would fill a tissue with black specks of dirt from the pollution and smog.  As I knew from health reporting, the city was a nightmare for asthma patients.  But in Lira, at least, the morning air seemed perfectly clear, as if a car or truck had never passed through.

My friend Zack met me out front, and he agreed to give me a tour of the town.  “I’m really happy you’re here,” he told me.  “Sometimes it gets really lonely.”  He told me about the preparations he was making for the child soldier conference. The children would attend workshops and talk about transitioning to life back home, but a major point of the conference was for the kids to have fun.  Most of them had missed out on their childhoods, forced to work as sex slaves if they were girls, or to fight their own families and communities, regardless of their gender.  There were stories of kids forced to kill their own parents, and loot the stores of their parents’ neighbors.  When it was over, they were told by the rebel commanders that they would never escape—their communities could never forgive them.

Zack and I headed over to a charity where he had worked as an intern when we studied abroad together, a charity started by a Ugandan who came to Europe as a refugee after being tortured during the former President Obote’s regime. The man, Nicholas, named the center after his wife, whom he met in Belgium when he fled Uganda, and the two resettled in Lira, where they work with disabled children, war-affected children, child mothers, and child soldiers.

As we walked to his charity along a dirt road where men offered bicycle rides around Lira for a low cost, we stopped in a small, tidy market full of vendors selling red groundnuts, cassava and mangos. Zack bought some groundnuts for his Ugandan “mom” in Lira, a friend he made during his first trip up there. We then stop at a vendor who sold a cheap meal of fried dough; called chapatti, eggs, and tomato slices, wrapped together to create what is called a “Rolex.” Not a watch, but a cheap, fattening dish, delicious because it’s a combination of fried dough and a lot of oil.

We then passed a large field full of homeless children, skinny and wearing ripped t-shirts and pants, who were kneeling near a tree, sniffing plastic glue containers for a high.  The field was mostly empty, but at the end there was a water pipe, where children came to fetch water and carry it back to their homes in large plastic containers.  Although I was used to seeing extreme forms of poverty in Kampala, which has been stripped of any semblance of social welfare from years of economic structural adjustment, I wasn’t used to seeing overt drug use by kids, who were looking for a moment of relief from a cheap high.  I wondered if any of the kids had been abducted by the LRA, or if they were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.  One thing was for sure, though, they had all been impacted by the war.

We visited the charity where Zack had worked, a rehabilitation center for disabled and war-affected children, and then went to a nearby school that had been created for former child soldiers.  The school looked like other high schools in Uganda, but a little nicer.  It wasn’t as crowded as other schools, and the facilities looked clean and new, though modest.  On a wall surrounding the school, the children had painted a mural of how they saw themselves as adults, and what they wanted their lives to be like.  Pictures of smiling lawyers, judges, and nurses decorated the wall.  Some of the children, of course, were already young adults in their twenties, trying to finally go to school after spending so many years abducted in the bush.

Zack had been to the school frequently to organize his conference, and he explained the kind of reporting I was interested in doing to the school’s headmaster.  The school was called Rachele, named after an episode in 1996 when 139 girls from a girl’s boarding school in northern Uganda were kidnapped by the LRA.  The college’s vice president, Sister Rachele Fassera, an Italian nun, offered her life to the LRA in exchange for the girls’ release.  The LRA decided to spare Rachele and gave her 109 of the abducted girls, but kept 30 of them hostage.  Five of the girls died in captivity, and 21 eventually escaped.  The Rachele School was set up, coincidentally, by the editor in chief at the newspaper I worked for, a Belgian journalist who wrote a book about the incident, called the Aboke Girls.   Sales from the book, and my editor’s fundraising, helped her put thousands of former child soldiers through school.

That day, visiting both the rehabilitation center and Rachele, I interviewed about ten children for my newspaper, and more than half had been abducted by the LRA.  The children at Rachele were very open in talking about their experiences with me, and used to having international visitors come to the school.  I interviewed a former child soldier named Bunny, who gave me his e-mail address so we could stay in touch, told me about his attempts to reconcile his former life with his current life.

The LRA had broken into Bunny’s home when he was a child, stolen his family’s few possessions, and abducted him and his brothers.  In order to be initiated into the LRA, they were whipped and beaten extensively, and forced to travel on foot for hundreds of miles to attend the LRA’S military training camps in Congo, Uganda, and Sudan.  Bunny and his brothers eventually escaped, but Bunny never prepared himself emotionally to run into the soldier who had kidnapped him.

Bunny had been in Lira when he saw the kidnapper, a young adult in his twenties. All the memories of his capture came rushing back.  I thought he would tell me then that it had been traumatizing for him to see his former captor, or that the encounter gave him nightmares.  But he didn’t.  Instead, Bunny told me that he went up to his former captor, and told him he was glad that he had escaped.  His captor, like him, was not an enemy—he was another child who had once been kidnapped and forced to serve under the LRA.  Seeing his captor in town, watching him attempt to build a life again in Lira as well, was a turning point for Bunny, who still remembered each detail of his capture vividly.

When I would go back to Kampala, Bunny’s story resonated with me, as did the story of a boarding school matron named Margaret.  Born and raised in Lira, she now worked for a rehabilitation center.  Like most northern Ugandans, she loathed the LRA and the Ugandan government in equal measure.  Both had been attacking the people in towns like Lira for two decades, each accusing them of collaborating with the other side.  But to Margaret, neither the LRA nor the Ugandan army was the largest threat to her children’s safety.  What Margaret feared was malaria.  A mother of ten, she had lost her four-year-old daughter many years ago to the disease.

We had sat in a small office room at the rehabilitation center, which had a map of Uganda neatly taped to the wall, and two large benches for guests to sit on.  Initially, Zack had had to convince her that I was not, well, a spy.

“She really doesn’t like me,” Zack whispered before he introduced me to her.  He also told me that the charity had basically run out of money three months before after Christopher, the founder of the center, got in a fight with their donors, and Margaret hadn’t been paid in three months.  Christopher and his wife had just opened a bar in Lira, planning to fund their operations by selling drinks to charity workers and farmers in the small town.  Donors be damned.

Margaret didn’t like me at first, either.  She scowled when she saw us, and reminded Zack that she hadn’t been paid by Christopher in months.  Zack responded sympathetically, then asked if I could interview her for a story I was writing about the recovery of northern Uganda, and the impact that the war had had on children.   A journalist.  Margaret gave me a disgusted looked after seeing that I had been stupid enough to wear my New Vision t-shirt around Lira—why not just wear a gigantic sign, that says, I’m a spy? After all, New Vision was partly owned by the government.  But she gave in, and told me what it was like to live in LRA in the 1980s and 1990s, when your children might be abducted, and you could never travel at night.

As we talked, Margaret told me that she hated the DDT spraying, and didn’t want them to spray her home.  She was worried that it was dangerous, or that the government knew it was dangerous and did not care.  She didn’t understand why the UN, after two decades, couldn’t round up the LRA, which consisted of about two thousand soldiers, most of them abducted children.

Even though she was against the DDT spraying, Margaret told me in detail about how the disease had killed her daughter, and how her other daughter suffered from a case of cerebral malaria, which didn’t kill her but left her physically and mentally retarded.  She blamed herself for the impact malaria had on her family, for not having enough money at the time to get treatment for her children, and told me she always kept malaria drugs in her home now, just in case.

“I feared that disease for so, so long,” she told me.  However, the DDT frightened her just as much, and she was afraid the chemical would hurt the children she still had.
I did interviews with Ugandans throughout the weekend about the effect the war had had on them, and how those who had been abducted by the LRA had attempted to rebuild their lives.  On Sunday, I caught a bus back to Kampala, and wondered what stories the other passengers carried quietly with them.  Were they like Bunny, making peace with their escape, as well as their captors? Or Margaret, afraid that the government would poison the Ugandans who had survived the decades of war?

I stayed in Uganda for a few more weeks, working as a reporter, but none of the stories compared to those that I encountered in northern Uganda.  I wondered if Margaret had ever been paid, and thought about her daughter, wasting away in Margaret’s village, unable to do basic activities at the local primary school.  The twenty mosquito bites that I had picked up in Lira faded into my skin, and I never developed a fever or chills.  I hadn’t been taking prophylactics, but I was lucky.  The mosquitoes that bit me were malaria-free.

Soon, it was time for me to head back to New York and finish a master’s degree in journalism that I had started at the City University of New York in Times Square.  I came back in August, and moved to a small room in Queens while I finished my degree.  Zack eventually came back to the United States in November, but he felt unfocused, still thinking about what would happen to the child soldiers that attended the conference he organized.  The rebel government was unable to sign a peace agreement with the Ugandan government, but they didn’t begin attacking Uganda either.  News from Uganda in the international press was dwarfed by the conflict that began to explode in Congo, Uganda’s neighbor.

But at night, when I tried to imagine my future, I couldn’t see myself working at a paper or news website in the U.S.  I had started an internship with the Queens Tribune, a weekly paper in New York City, but I checked Ugandan news websites more frequently than I did my own paper.  Somehow, I knew, I had to get back North, and I didn’t care about the threat of malaria.  I had dodged the malaria bullet, and I could do it again.  I had to go back, and chase those stories in Uganda.  All I needed was a notepad and a good mosquito net.

The Poseidon Bakery on 9th Avenue near West 44th Street has been a neighborhood fixture for more than 85 years.  The Greek pastry shop is like an extension of the owner’s kitchen.  Lili Fable, who runs the bakery with her son Paul, called her family “quintessential shopkeepers” because she still lives upstairs with her husband Anthony.  Even Paul lives in the building with his wife and children.

Anthony’s family started the business in what is now the Port Authority Bus Terminal.  When his father’s bakery was evicted by the city in the early 1950s to build the terminal, they moved to the spot near 44th Street.

“In those years you couldn’t fight the city,” Lili said.

Anthony’s father bought the entire building at 629 9th Avenue.  The bakery has been in that location since 1952.

“We have staying power,” Lili said.

Many new restaurants have opened over the past few years, but Lili didn’t think they would last.

A new gourmet pizzeria is opening on the corner, she said, and their rent is nearly $12,000 a month.

“How much pizza do you have to sell?” she said.

Lili said she didn’t know how Poseidon would have survived if they had to pay the astronomical rents the neighborhood now commands.

The bakery’s homey atmosphere has also contributed to its staying power.  Lili keeps photographs of her grandkids behind the counter, and drawings they’ve made in school on the refrigerator.

The musty smell of fermentation emanated from a back room where phyllo dough is made.  Poseidon is the only bakery in the country that makes phyllo dough by hand.

Large, mold-green bricks lined the baking room, and the windows were too cracked and dirty to let in much light.

“Phyllo means leaf in Greek,” Lili said as she smoothed her hand over one of the tissue thin sheets of dough.

The sheets of dough were placed between layers of raw, unbleached muslin on two large tables.  Extra muslin hung on a clothes line strung across the back wall.  An industrial clothes dryer stood by to keep the muslin bone dry on humid days.  Otherwise, the dough would stick to it.

Nata and Eric, Lili’s employees, make phyllo all day long.  Nata stood on the flour-covered floor, rolling out dough balls called boulakas to the size of large, thin pizzas.  He listened to a Spanish language radio station and sung along to the music as he worked.

“Nata’s been doing this for 35 years,” Lili said.

Lili brought finished phyllo into the next room where all the pastries were assembled and baked.

Kaila, 19, is the only one who assists Lili with making pastries.  She wore lavender Crocs and listened to an iPod while making flogera, phyllo cylinders stuffed with custard and nuts.

Kaila started working at Poseidon last October, and learned how to make all of the pastries in two days.  Even though the hours can be long, especially around the holidays, she loves her job.

“Lili’s like a mother to me,” she said, “and boy, can she cook!”

Kaila’s specialty is making miniature pastries, or cocktails, that are popular for parties.  But her handiwork was suddenly interrupted.

“Kai-LA!” Eric, her boyfriend, yelled from the phyllo room.

She rolled her eyes and asked “Que pasa?” before returning to her post.

While Kaila worked quickly, Lili wrapped vegetable pies called Menina mash at lightning speed.  Lili’s mother-in-law Menina invented the pie to get her children to eat vegetables.

Lili methodically brushed phyllo with melted butter from a coffee can, stuffed it with spinach, and folded the package into a triangle.  A stack of finished trays multiplied by her elbow.

“I love how green these veggies came today!” Lili said, pausing to admire her work.  “Emerald green, St. Patty’s Day green!”

Soon, the pastries were ready for the oven.  Lili called the two ceiling-high ovens “Vulcan,” after the Greek god of fire.  She and her husband couldn’t agree whether they are 80 or 100 years old, but they looked like they could easily be older.

The heat of the huge cast iron furnaces can be felt from at least five feet away, and usually kept Lili away.

“They’re too tall and I’m afraid of getting burned,” she said.

But the day was cold and the ovens warmed the back room.

“It’s so cold out,” she said.  “I need to go sit by the oven.”

The pastries already baking inside smelled like Christmas, emitting a scent of cinnamon and cloves.

The doorbell rang, signaling that a customer had entered.  Lili shuffled in her battered black clogs from the baking room to the front counter to assist the customer.  Trays of pastries fresh from the “Vulcan” beckoned: spanakopita, baklava, cherry cheese strudel and kounbiedes cookies.

Lili put up a pot of coffee and offered some to everyone.  She put some pies in the oven to get warm.

“Anthony, I need a meat pie, too,” she called to her husband in the baking room.

A middle-aged man in a red and black plaid jacket perused the pastry cases as the half-century old refrigerators wheezed.

“Take your time, we have all the savories in the oven,” Lili said.

He was visiting his son, a Juilliard student, who lives nearby.  He requested a cherry strudel and a spinach pie.

“I just put a pot of coffee on,” Lili told him.  “You interested in coffee?”

He wasn’t, but soon the mailman arrived.  He announced his presence by yanking open the front door and yelling “Mailman!”

Lili said “o-pa!” as she lifted a heavy tray.  She greeted the mailman and the rest of her customers with a cheery “Hello!”

The ancient teal cash register opened with a “ping!” as miniature busts of Greek philosophers watched over the proceedings.  Replicas of ancient Greek vases and signed headshots of celebrity fans like Ernie Anastos and Olympia Dukakis were mixed in.

But Poseidon still caters to a local, family clientele, not just celebrities.

Lili said some families have been coming back for three generations, especially to buy traditional Greek Easter cakes.

“Every Greek family in creation must have a koulouda,” she said.  Koulouda is a braided sweet bread with dyed red eggs baked into it that is eaten at Easter.

Even though customers may have moved away, the bakery will ship items anywhere in the United States.  Lili has sent packages to Maine, Hawaii, Colorado and Puerto Rico.  But her most unusual request was for a family who wanted to bring her pastries back to Greece with them.

Though Poseidon might not ship anything back to the motherland this Easter, the pace of the bakery’s work will pick up quickly in the coming weeks.

“Work hard, play a little, work hard, play a little,” Lili said about the bakery’s schedule.

With Greek Easter only a month away, Lili and her employees were relishing the calm before the storm.

“Right now,” she said, “we’re just going about our lives as we always have.”

When people hang out at Hudson Bar and Books in Manhattan, they’re not flipping pages—they’re flicking ashes. It’s a place where the non-smokers are milling around outside the front door as they decide if a face-full of tobacco smoke is worth a step inside a place where smokers rule.

“Is this legal?” a passerby yells from the street outside the front door of this Greenwich Village cigar bar on a recent Saturday evening.

Six years after Mayor Bloomberg’s statewide anti-smoking law took effect, the patrons of Hudson Bar and Books puff away in a perpetual haze of toxic smoke. It’s one of a handful of cigar bars left in Manhattan under a “grandfather” clause that protected cigar bars that opened before December 31, 2001.

No new indoor smoking bars have been permitted to open in the city since then. The mayor has proclaimed the law a public-health success, cutting down on the risks of second-hand smoke for employees, and even cutting down the number of smokers in New York City.

“We have to pay a yearly fee and we were given a special permit,” says bartender Eladio Hultzll, who doesn’t smoke.

Hultzll has manned the bar on Saturday nights for two years now and says the smoke doesn’t bother him. He opens the door, which is steps away from the bar, on a cold night every hour or so to catch a breath of fresh air.

“Not for me,” he says. “For you.”

In addition to the special permit, the bar also has to pass a yearly test of the humidifiers that filter the air. The menu is limited and it sells more tobacco and alcohol than food.

“We only offer light fare,” says Hultzll. “But you can smoke anything you want.”

Except for a small pizza or two and an order of steamed dumplings for the two women sitting at the corner table, there’s not much food to be seen. The vibe is celebratory because this is a place to drink some major whiskey and to smoke a Cuban like an aficionado. The bar-full of sophisticated adults and the highbrow furnishings are tamed a bit by all the smoke.

Steve Hertzberg, 48, of Manhattan is pleased that he picked this unofficial anniversary to throw back a glass of Ben Nevis and toke on a $15 La Aroma de Cuba Robusto. Hultzll delivered the cigar on a silver platter, with a votive candle, a small glass filled with wooden sticks, another small glass of water and a cigar cutter. Hertzberg lights the sticks with the candle and lights his Robusto before putting the flame out in the water.

“Class,” he says.

There’s no way around the aroma of nutmeg, allspice and the occasional whiff of cedar that emanate from the high-end cigars. Crystal ashtrays dot the copper-topped bar and everyone is lighting, dipping and smoking.

“Bloomberg destroyed this city by stopping people from smoking in bars,” says Hertzberg. “So to have a place where you can come and smoke—it’s a great night.”

The whole place is about the size of two subway cars. A dark leather sectional sofa backs up against a wall of leather-bound books in the back of the room. But the sofa is empty. The bar is the place to be. There’s sense of camaraderie that borders on naughtiness as smokers inhale the forbidden leaf.

Top-notch whiskeys, rums and vodkas line the whole back of the bar with the serious stuff displayed in beveled glass cabinetry. Ceiling fans alternate with chandeliers on a painted tin ceiling that work together to illuminate and lift up the smoke. More shelves of books pull it all together in chic style.

But the fraternity of smokers that flock to cigar bars are a dying breed.  More than a quarter-million fewer New Yorkers smoked in 2007 than in 2003, when the ban took effect, according to the city Health Department.

In the first year of the ban, the number of smokers fell by 13 percent—the steepest decline of anywhere in the country, the agency said.  The number is based on a telephone survey of adults, who smoked every day and at least 100 cigarettes a year.  But, statistics aside, the power of the puff can weaken the best of them.

“I only smoke when I come here,” said Julie Seyler, 53, an ex-smoker from Manhattan. “It’s such a nice atmosphere and it is nice to come to a bar and have a drink and a cigarette.”

She lit another cigarette before the first one went out in the ashtray.

Just as he had all summer, Ziering arrived alone, his wife, and old partner Robbin, has stayed home sick, again. But as he made his appearance at 5:30, he showed no sign of missing her and eagerly made his way to the rink.

The slight, 75-year-old Ziering laced up his hand-dyed purple classic quad skates, and joined the action of the circle, shaking hands and shouting hellos. As the music played, Ziering’s torso twisted and turned only slightly stiffer then his younger counterparts in the rink, some whom he had taught to roller skate years ago.

Dressed in his token purple Skate Association sweatshirt and long khaki pants, Ziering sported a purple cap over his gray-white hair, cut short save for a thin braid off to the side. Hanging from his neck, wrists and ears, he displayed an array of gold and silver roller jewelry, some of it themed like the tiny roller skate dangling from his left lobe.

As Ziering faced the crowd who were watching the skaters in the park, he energized himself by showing off a fancy, double toe-stop before spinning in a circle.  He gave a sleepy eyed smile, which almost looked like a grimace, before he tucked his arms in a crescent and spun again.

Anyone in the crowd surrounding the skate circle could guess Ziering’s age.  His skin hung loose on his lean body and without a hat on, the crown of his head shone smooth in the sun.  Yet, despite his appearance, he gave the impression of perfect health, which was mostly true.  The only thing he really couldn’t do was lift his left arm by himself because of a damaged rotator cuff, which happened a few years ago.

While Ziering shrugged it off, the injury had affected his skating and dancing.  He can’t properly lead his partners anymore.  The people he skates with regularly know to pick up his arm when he squeezes their hand.   From the outside, it doesn’t seem to bother him much; he still skated with vigor to the DJ’s disco beats.

The skate circle hopped with Ziering’s close friends, save for Robbin.  While Ziering’s injuries hadn’t kept him down, his wife’s kept her out of the scene.  Robbin had suffered a back injury few years ago in 2005, and had never fully recovered.

The night happened to be Robbin’s birthday, October 9, and the couple was celebrating at the Roxy nightclub.  As they skate danced, Robbin’s wheels locked with Ziering’s.  She fell straight down and landed flat on her tailbone, causing trauma to the vertebra.  Despite the pain, Robbin wanted to enjoy her special day and continued to skate the night away.  She knew something was wrong, but ignored it.  Later on, she went to the doctor and found out the fall had broken her back.

At first, the pain didn’t stop her from going out skating with Ziering.  But whenever she fell, the old injury flared up, and each time it was a little worse.  The pain led to depression and eventually she gave up roller skating.  Robbin also gave up her place as Ziering’s partner in the rink, which only added to the emotional turmoil she felt.

Ziering obviously felt bad for her.  The svelte woman he married gained over 30 pounds and just sat in bed all day, crippled by depression and physical pain while her husband flourished in his day-to-day routine.

What could he do, Ziering thought.  Roller skating had been his love long before Robbin had entered his life.  Her listless attitude both angered and saddened him, and he missed the times when they could skate together.

But alone in the Central Park skate circle, Ziering’s spirits remained high.  He skated over to DJ RC La Rock’s booth with ease to take the microphone.

“Everybody that can hear my voice, put your hands together,” Ziering, said.  “Welcome to the Central Park Dance Skate Association.  This is a beautiful day.  Now, some rules…”
Ziering finally finished and gave the spotlight back to Tyron, another member of the Skate Association.  He wandered over to the sideline, taking in the dozens of people gathered to watch the dancers.  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a woman whose skating made him nostalgic.

He watched as a slender, 30-something woman with long wavy brown hair skated by, dressed in fitted black clothes.  Her face appeared relaxed and had the look of absolute bliss, not unlike his wife’s face when she started roller skating.

“That,” Ziering thought, “is the face of joy.”

Ziering reminisced about the time when Robbin was like the woman in the skate circle.  She loved the activity so much that in 1997, when they got married, it was on skates at the Roxy, the Mecca of roller skating at the time.  On their wedding day, the couple was escorted to the doors of the club by a horde of motorcycles led by Robbin’s brother.
Robbin, in her mid-40s at the time, wore a flowing lavender dress that accentuated her slender figure.  She also had on a dark purple cast, but the memory of how she broke her arm got lost among the excitement of the wedding.   Then 65, Ziering had on a white suit with a deep purple cummerbund and tie, and a gray hairpiece–something he wore until Robbin convinced him he looked better without it.  They stood hand in hand, her blonde head taller than his silver one by a few inches.

The most traditional moment of the Jewish ceremony was the symbolic breaking of the glass.  Ziering managed to smash it on the third try by using his purple skate.  Glass shattered, the couple kissed with a desperate fever, and the large crowd made up of family and roller skating friends erupted in hoots and hollers.

Ziering then led Robbin on to the vast wooden floor for their first dance as husband and wife.  They gazed into each other’s eyes and started moving as Gato Barbieri’s Europa played.  Clutched tight, they glided effortlessly around the floor.

Robbin stepped out for the second song, nervous her skating might not be good enough for a more complex performance.  Her new husband opted to dance with one of his previous partners instead.  Ziering and Bunny delighted the crowd as they skated in a swing dance style routine.

The third dance was the last one Ziering and Robbin did together.  After that, the floor opened up to the guests.  Everyone joined in, even people who weren’t part of the skate community, like Ziering’s one and only son, Stephon, who was from his first marriage.

Between performances by star skaters and Ziering himself, Robbin and Lezly’s wedding was one of the top skating events of the year.  Not only was everyone happy at the union of the Zierings, but also they had the Roxy, among other skating spots in the city.  The skating life was good back then.

And, for Ziering, it still is.  Though he is well past his teenage years, he thinks of himself as a responsible adolescent.  The energy he displayed in the park proved it as he neared the end of an entire day on skates.  Earlier that October 4th morning, and most Saturdays, Ziering had taught one of his many roller skating classes.  But he was still going strong at sunset, despite all the exertion and rainy weather.
*    *    *
The weather was one reason fall became tricky for skating.  Gray clouds hung heavy in the sky threatening more then a sprinkle, and, on the wet 52-degree October morning, the idea of roller skating outdoors was not appealing.   In a small park in Greenwich Village, students waited for Ziering to make his debut.

“Do you think class will be canceled?” a tall, pretty brunette asked her fellow classmates.

Lorraine Espinosa settled down on to the wooden bench.  Its peeling green paint revealed how long it, along with all the others, had weathered the seasons.  Two more people joined her, but at five past 11, Ziering hadn’t.

Ten minutes later he pulled up on his purple bicycle dragging along a large bag stuffed with neatly folded black kneepads and wrist guards, and brown quad skates, remnants of the Roxy, which had closed its doors for good in spring of 2007.

“Stay,” Ziering commanded the bike as he leaned it against the fence.  Unlocking his black leather fanny pack, Ziering made his way over to the new students.

“Hi,” he said.  “If it doesn’t rain anymore, I think we can have class.”

Even on skates Ziering was small, around five-foot, four-inches, almost four inches shorter then he had been before numerous knee and hip surgeries and age shrunk him.  This time, like all the times before, the crowd’s eyes were on Ziering as he began lesson one.

For over 30 years Ziering’s lessons stayed the same, just the place changed.  When Ziering met Robbin 13 years ago, he was running his own roller skating school.  She wanted to learn to skate and he became attracted to her perky, eager-to-learn nature.

Suddenly, Robbin was everywhere he was—at the Roxy, in the park, and going to all the events.  Eventually, their friendship escalated beyond dinner and a chat.  Robbin became another one of Ziering’s lovers.

But Robbin was different from the other students he had dated.  Not only was she 20 years his junior, but she was also one of the oldest people in the country to have cystic fibrosis; an inherited disease that clogs the lungs and leads to respiratory infections.

It was one of the times she was hospitalized that led Ziering to discover how he really felt about her.  In 1996, he was leaving the county to perform at a New Year’s party in Morocco.  Robbin was in the hospital, terribly ill, and tubes stuck out from her in all directions.

Before he was about to leave, Ziering visited Robbin.  She looked at him with tears in her blue eyes and he held her hand, trying to comfort her gentle sobs.  She thought that was it.  He would go to Morocco and leave her for another woman.  Her suspicions weren’t actually that far off.

Ziering was planning on meeting up with Tammy, a Japanese girl who had also been a student of his and was now his lover.  The two had planned on sharing a room in Morocco for a few months.

But when he got there  he couldn’t get Robbin’s parting words out of his mind.

As he was leaving the hospital, she said, “Why can’t I have ever have somebody to love.”  And Ziering’s heart broke.

When he got to Morocco he told Tammy that he had someone else who he had great feeling for and planned to be with.  Completely shocked, Tammy ended their love affair right then and there.  But

Ziering didn’t care.  He called Robbin right away and said he was taking her to his house to live once he got back to New York.

Sobbing on the phone, she said, “This is the best New Year’s eve of my life.”

*    *    *

Robbin and Ziering lasted longer then the skate studio they met in.  After it closed Ziering flitted around to various spots before settling on Mercer Park, which was a few blocks from his house.

It was at the park where Ziering continued to teach on October 4th.

“Now, push your knee in toward the left when you turn, yes, good job,” he told the students.  “Ok, don’t skate too fast, little and longer strokes.  Here, watch me.”

Ziering had been seriously skating for 29 years.  The first time he really got into it was when his second wife, Sandy, brought him to Village Skating, now a pub near his apartment.  A professional dancer, Ziering actually balked at the idea of putting on skates.  He felt nervous that he might hurt himself on the rink and didn’t want to take the chance of ruining his career.

As he observed the crowd spinning and dancing on their skates, a light went on in his head. “This is for me!” he thought.

The next day Ziering went out, bought roller skates, a book on skating and practiced in his studio.  Within five days, he had completed all 20 lessons in the book and was completely hooked on the sport.  Now, he took responsibility for training numerous skating stars and has earned the reputation as the go-to skate guy, and one of the best teachers.

Getting used to skating can be hard.  While the new skaters’ bodies ached from trying out fresh muscles, Ziering went on tirelessly.  It was only at the end of the lesson that he had his first awkward moment.

Ziering struggled to reach a small piece of wood lying in his path.  Finally, after a couple of tries, and bending as much as he could, Ziering clutched the stick between two of his finger tips.  He then turned to the class with a wry smile on his face.
“Hey, after two knee and a hip replacements I can’t bend over like I used too,” he said, and chuckled before tossing the twig away.
*    *    *
That same week, Ziering rested in his apartment with Robbin.  They sat in the purple and red themed living room.  Roller skates lined the floor under the book shelves.  Framed photos covered many of the surfaces and the purple leather couch was adorned by one of their four cats.

Robbin now spent most of her time at home, in slippers, not skates.  She also spent a lot of time at the hospital.  Robbin used to be a nurse and knows a lot about medicine and diagnostics.   But her knowledge isn’t apparent in the way she takes care of herself.   She spends much of her day in bed sleeping and her eating habits consist of yogurt, sugar and lots of carbs.   Because of these two factors, her once slender frame now resembles a barrel and she has to wear Ziering’s T-shirts and baggy jeans or sweatpants.

“I won’t go to a vegetarian restaurant,” she said to Ziering, making a point about his diet choices.  As she got ready to go the doctor she continued,  “I think it smells like someone who hasn’t taken a shower in 10 days.”

“Oh boy,” replied her husband, rolling his eyes.

Ziering is a complete health nut and no longer eats meat.  He didn’t start to understand the importance of diet until the early 90s when he almost died from double pneumonia.
In the hospital, Ziering’s friend Joe brought him basic brown rice and veggies.  It was then he had an epiphany–if he ate better, he would feel better.   And, except for some mechanical problems, he has been feeling fine ever since.

But that doesn’t keep Ziering from the doctor’s office.   He brings his wife to the doctor at least once a month.

Ziering takes care of her at home too. Robbin’s illness has made her depressed and lethargic.   So he wakes her up and makes sure she is supplied with her favorite food, Yoplait yogurt.  She eats over half a dozen containers a day.

Robbin does help where she can, mostly with the health of the four cats.  On this Thursday afternoon, she was taking care of Tigger, their three-legged tabby who had been sneezing for a few days.

As Robbin went to get the antibiotics, Ziering bent down to pet Rainbow, one of the other cats.

“Hee hee, she’s a sweet baby,” he said to the cat.  “Yes you are, with your little white paws.”

A picture of Rainbow sitting on Ziering’s head when she was a kitten has a place next to photos of Robbin and Ziering in the Central Park skate circle 10 years ago.  Ziering struck a dashing pose in one.  He had a gray handlebar mustache that almost concealed his wide grin, and a silvery toupee covered his scalp.  Robbin, smiled coyly in another photo and her blonde hair was cropped short.

Today, her hair is still cut the same way, but her face in the picture showed how much less she weighed then.

It wasn’t that long ago when Robbin worked as a visiting nurse in Harlem for kids with AIDS.  She stayed there for years before they had to let her go.

“You know Robbin, you are out sick as much as you are in,” said one of her supervisors on that fateful day.  “But we want to do something for you so you can get your social security disability.”

Now she lives off social security money, and what her husband makes teaching skating and selling custom roller skates.

“Lezly!” Robbin called from the kitchen.  “I have to give Tigger his medicine.”

Ziering walked into the small room, “He wouldn’t take any of his moist food at all today,” he said.  “And he barely had any of his dry food.”

“Really?” Robbin asked, her voice more worried then it was when she talked about her own sickness.

She turned to the cat. “My baby, my baby! Come here.”

As Robbin held Tigger down on the multi-tiered cat tower, Ziering admired her ability to “pill the cat.”  It was something he couldn’t do.  Robbin, who used to give pills to sick babies as a nurse, didn’t think twice about it.

*    *    *

Ziering’s usual day started at 10 or 11 a.m. and he ended it around four in the morning.  When he didn’t have to take care of Robbin, he liked to stay up late working on organizing the Skate Association  and Crazy Legs, his latest venture, and an important one for the skating community.
Empire skate rink closed down April 2007, and the Roxy shut its doors in the beginning of March the same year—both places couldn’t afford to have roller skating there anymore.  The Roxy reopened as a night club, but not somewhere to skate in again.  Because of the loss of space, Ziering has spent much of his time since then looking for a permanent indoor rink for skaters.

“Happy birthday to me,” Ziering thought sadly when he received a phone call at the beginning of March 2007 that informed him Roxy’s demise was finalized.  The skaters had recently moved back there after it’s first closing months before.  The reunion only lasted a month before the venue shut down for good.

After it closed, the skaters had to move from rink to rink.  They often traveled to Staten Island, New Jersey, and Long Island.  These places proved difficult to reach without a car and Robbin rarely came along.

Ziering remembered the early September day this year when all that changed after a West Indian man named Wilfred Samuel came to his apartment looking for custom roller skates.  Ziering measured Samuel’s foot for the leather casing and had him pick a style of body, which Ziering would then order parts and construct the skates in his home.

When Ziering brought out the wheel choices Samuel told him he would be skating in the gym of a Salvation Army building he ran in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.  Ziering’s ears perked up immediately and he jumped on the chance of starting a skate night there.

They made a deal and that night Ziering emailed everyone on his skaters list to tell them the good news – Crazy Legs was born, they could stop looking.

On Wednesday night, October 8, Crazy Legs had been open for three weeks and had made its name known in the New York roller skate scene as a hot spot.  The music could be heard a block away as people approached an open door, which revealed the glittering of Christmas lights and shadows of people quickly going by. There was no sign it would stop.

After almost a month in the space, Ziering felt in his element. Wearing purple leather skates and a royal purple mesh shirt, he greeted people as they arrived.  At 9 p.m., the gym had about 40 to 50 men and women from ages 20 to 75.  In the center, people dance-skated in formation while others circled them counterclockwise.  As DJ Rikky Rivera spun classic R&B and dance tunes, the volume of the music throbbed through the skaters’ bodies.

Around the floor, metal fold out chairs allowed people to change out of their shoes or take a break.  Robbin perched on one wearing wrist braces, but no skates.

“I am turning in my skates for the night,” she said to the person next to her.  Robbin explained that she had taken a bad fall and couldn’t continue.

Tonight was the first time in a while that she tried the sport again.  She wanted desperately to get back in the rink.  But, after the accident tonight, she didn’t feel confident enough to get on the floor again.  Ziering kept coming over and checking on her.

“How are you doing?” he asked, concerned for her comfort.  “Are you okay?”

She finally told him she wanted to stay and relief washed over him as he skated back into the crowd.  A few moments later, he checked back again, this time with a small wrench in his hand.

“I gotta fix someone’s skate,” he said.  “I will be right back.”

“He is always sacrificing his fun to help other people,” said Robbin wistfully.  “He always takes care of me.”

That wasn’t his original plan.  Ziering had been a steadfast bachelor and never really looked for a relationship.

“He said, ‘You know Robbin, I am going to be a bachelor forever,’ and I was ready to accept that,” Robbin said to the person seated next to her.

As Robbin chatted about her and Ziering’s relationship, numerous skaters came over to give her hugs and see how she felt.

“I skated today! But I fell down,” she said, her wrist-braced hands tucked docile in her lap.  Cystic fibrosis had made her look almost the same age as her husband and had slowed her down considerably.  At the same time, Ziering zipped around like he was 50 years younger.  Robbin shuffled and appeared to be in constant pain.  Her eyes shined with moisture, as if she was about to cry.

While Robbin watched the skaters, Ziering held court in the cafeteria room. His purple clad figure was silhouetted against a poorly painted mural of Martin Luther King.  Gripping a white roller skate between his legs, Ziering attempted to fix the second skate of the evening.

“I can’t believe I am fixing it with this,” he said, holding up a tiny wrench.  “I would never use a tool like this.”

“You are my skating hero,” said Lisa, the girl whose skate he worked on.

“He is known as the skate guru,” her friend Polly said, and went over to Ziering.  “Do you think she can remove her toe stops?” she asked, gesturing to the bright red rubber stump at the toe of the skate.

“But how do I stop without it?” asked Lisa.

Polly’s blue eyes met Ziering’s and both lit up with mutual understanding.

“She’s not ready if she is asking!” he said out loud.  Polly nodded as her blond tresses fell over her bare shoulders.

Polly, who learned to skate from Ziering in 1998 at the Roxy, demonstrated how she nimbly stopped without the classic roller skate breaks.  Ziering joined her, both of them sliding toward Lisa.

“This is a hockey stop, and this is a T-stop,” he said, crossing one foot in front of the other.  “But this is why it’s good to have toe stops,” said Ziering, laughing before ending on point like a ballet dancer.

Ziering’s professional dance career started when he was 12.  He studied at the Paris Opera Ballet School in France.  In 1958, Ziering danced in the film Margerie Morningstar, where he got to partner with Natalie Wood.

In his bedroom at home, Ziering relished the relics of his past.  A large white piece of poster board sported suave photos of him in his much younger days in various yoga-like dance positions.

Back in the gym Ziering began to skate again.  Robbin lamented to her friend that she was unable to roller dance to the slow songs.  Ziering came back, checked on his wife, and then met up with Beth, one of his skating partners for the past 20 years.

They took to the floor, arm in arm. Picking up speed, Ziering guided her as she skated backwards.  He led her in a twirl as he shuffled his feet effortlessly on the smooth surface.  Robbin watched from the side.

“I hope to be his partner again,” Robbin said, nasal East Coast accent breaking through the bass from the speakers. “Next time I will be in skates.”

*    *    *

On October 18, a freezing cold Saturday, Ziering found himself traveling alone to see one of his past students perform at the Spiegletent in Lower Manhattan’s South Street Seaport.  He was tired, and didn’t know if he would make it.

It was hard for Ziering to enjoy himself while his wife sat on the sidelines.  He knew Robbin was getting sicker and sicker, but he often told people she was doing better.  Even when she was in the hospital, he tried to stay upbeat.

“Robbin sees the glass half empty while I see it half full,” Ziering rationalized to himself about their relationship.

He wanted her be with him more, but he had a difficult time getting his wife stay positive or even join him for most events.  But, he pushed himself to leave alone and when he arrived where he stirred up so much excitement that it appeared he was the performer.

“Hey!” one man called out, “Lezly is here!”

The group at the table smiled in unison as one after the other stood to hug or shake Ziering’s hand.  When the greetings were finished, Ziering scanned the room for a chair and sat down near the front.

The wind whipped through the antique tent, shaking the velvet curtains and causing the mirrored disco ball to sway.  The air was chilly, warmed only by the few dozen bodies that surrounded the small wooden stage.  Ziering situated himself and wrapped his purple leather jacket tightly around his torso.  He turned toward the front as Amy G., aka Amy Gordon, took the stand.

Tall and lanky, G wore a long, form fitting black dress, a white feather boa, and a hat with a cherry tree branch protruding from the top.  Slung across her shoulder was a ukulele and on her feet, she had well worn black roller skates.

“That’s my Amy,” Ziering said under his breath when he saw the young, attractive woman.  Ziering had taught G to skate dance a few years ago and he went to see her when he could.

“Thank you all for coming.  It was quick, but I came too,” G said, as the crowd erupted in laughter.

Ziering made a low chuckle and then put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

It’s easy to see why Ziering liked watching G so much.  She is cute, talented and flirty–three of his favorite personality traits.

“I see this side of the bus and in big, bubbly, chocolate letters it says, ‘Find the perfect man,’” she said.  “In this room I see several options.”  She looked at Ziering again before going into a roller skating tap routine.

G isn’t the only roller skating diva that Ziering has taught.  From over one third of the Gotham Girls roller derby team to the cast of Xanadu and Starlight Express, who gave him a standing ovation after their first production, Ziering has long been New York’s “Skate Guru.”

While watching G’s last skit, Ziering didn’t dwell on his career.  He was totally caught up in G’s bawdy act.

“Oh, this is great!” he said, lips stretching into a tight smile.  “I love this part.”

G faced the audience and lowered the microphone down to her crotch.  She then proceeded to wiggle out of three pairs of underpants, which she left dangling around her ankles.  With a sly smile, she reached into her purse and elegantly pulled out a sparkly gold and silver kazoo.

Theatrically she lubricated the instrument with her mouth before placing it under her skirt.  Her face looked concentrated, then surprised, and then extremely relaxed, euphoric actually.  Ziering laughed and stomped on the ground as G proceeded to play “America the Beautiful” with the strategically placed kazoo.

After it was over, Ziering made his way to her.  “That was great honey, a little slow in the beginning, but great.”

G, who reached about 6 feet tall on skates, bent over and hugged him.  Ziering didn’t stay long, he was freezing and tired from a long day of skating.

*    *    *

The last Sunday in October celebrated a successful season of roller skating. This year the day was perfect for a farewell get together, and their yearly Halloween party.  Over a hundred people gathered in Central Park for the festivities, but as the day dwindled, Ziering still hadn’t arrived.  He was missing his own event.

Ziering had planned on coming, he wanted to come, but things were bringing him down.  Ziering was tired of doctors and problems. He was also tired of fighting with Robbin, which was the reason he had come to the skate circle so late.

At about 5 p.m., Ziering showed up on his bicycle, alone.  He entered the DJ square in the middle of the action and folded up his bike.

People skated over to say hi.   As soon as he took off his black jacket, revealing a red spandex suit, a Halloween costume for Ziering who was without a drop of his token purple.   In the cool fall air observers watched as the Hulk, Spiderman, and Batman joined a princess, a couple of fairies, and a creepy clown in the rink.

Eager to join them, Ziering laced up his skates and covered them with American flag casings so no purple remained.  Almost as soon as he got them on, his wife showed up, teetering delicately to a chair.

Her presence made an even greater stir in the crowd.

“Hi Robbin! How you doing?” one masked man said.

“Hi honey, how you feeling?”

“Hey guys! It’s Robbin!”

Robbin sheepishly said hello to people, but it didn’t look like she really wanted to be there.  She hadn’t worn a costume and her gray sweatshirt and blue jeans were in stark contrast to Ziering’s fiery red body suit.   Bending over, she pulled out her black skates and proceeded to tie them on.

This was the first time she had been to the park all season.  Ziering went over to her, speaking low into her ear.  She waved him off and he skated away to mingle.
Robbin struggled with the laces until she finally tied them.  She then put her wrist braces on and stood unsteadily.  In a way, Robbin looked like a beginning skater.  She appeared unsure of her wheeled feet and her face expressed worry as one of her friends came over and embraced her.

Robbin slowly made her way to the rink, stopping every few feet to chat.  Batman finally took her hand and led her around.

Where Robbin was nervous, Ziering zipped around gracefully.  He loved being here.  The Skate Association  was his family, his friends, and part of what kept him going.  After the Halloween party, the group would be smaller.  Only the die-hards would come out in the snow to shovel a spot to skate in.

Robbin eventually found her husband and he ushered her to a quieter side of the rink.  There he helped here with her steps.  After Robbin’s break through four days prior at Crazy Legs, Ziering had high hopes for today.

That Wednesday, a moment of clarity hit Robbin.  Suddenly, skating had come back to her and for a brief period she moved like she wasn’t sick or injured.

As they danced on the floor, Ziering was blown away by his wife’s progress, and so was she.  Just that day she declared she would never roller skate again, but there she was, picking up her feet, doing cross-overs and skating backwards.

Robbin looked at Ziering, tears of joy pouring from her eyes as she finally danced with her husband.  He felt like crying too, not only was she skating again, but this could mean she was getting better.

But in Central Park, it looked like she might cry again, though not with the same emotion.  These were more tears of frustration because her legs wouldn’t do what they were supposed to do.  Ziering circled around her to make it look like she was turning, trying to hide his disappointment.

As they slowly danced, Beth zipped over to the couple.  She had dressed like a wood nymph, clothed in a brown dress and with leaves strewn in her hair.  She greeted Robbin cheerily before gesturing to Ziering and the rink.  He declined her invitation and watched as she skated back into the pulsating crowd.  Ziering stayed with his wife, their arms entwined and awkwardly working at the moves.

This wasn’t fun for him.  He came out to the park for entertainment and having to lead someone who couldn’t skate aggravated him.   Ziering practiced with her until someone called him over to the DJ booth to make an announcement.

Taking the microphone, Ziering thanked the crowd for being there for the last day of the season and reminded them about Crazy Legs, the indoor winter spot for skating.

Robbin lingered behind him while Ziering finished up.  He turned around to say more hellos, confirm he was doing fine, and that Crazy Legs was off the hook.

By 6 p.m., it was almost twilight, and much cooler then the hour before.  The dancers continued until the last possible second, enjoying the most they could before the winter came.
In the end, Ziering led Robbin, arm in arm, on to the rink.  His red spandex suit glowed in the low light while his small, fragile body supported his wife.

A week later, despite all the progress Robbin had been showing, she was back in the hospital.  Her body and mind were suffering from her disease.  Ziering didn’t know if she would ever get better, and part of him just wanted to end the relationship for good.  Especially when she came between him and roller skating.